Going Clear: Seeing Through the Hazy Road to Cloud Adoption

According to Gartner, the public cloud market now exceeds $40 billion. Yet despite the popularity of cloud computing and its promises of IT cost reduction, challenges abound for organizations looking to take advantage of this trojan horse.

From determining management objectives to ensuring a stable infrastructure, Forbes recently published a list of the 13 biggest challenges when taking on a cloud migration. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on three primary questions:

How do I migrate applications to the cloud efficiently?

Can I use multiple cloud platforms?

How can I prepare my team and get ahead of possible integration complexities?

By migrating applications to the cloud, enterprises can transform their growth journey by creating engaging customer experiences, developing new revenue streams and improving the productivity of their business operations. The key to enabling this is by adopting new technology and processes.

Here, ‘technology’ refers to the platform and tools necessary to develop and efficiently operate software in the cloud and its associated infrastructure. ‘Processes’ comprise the development and operational procedures that consistently deliver high-quality software in a culture that embraces change.

To shift from “cloud as a concept” to “cloud ready,” organizations must address these three fundamental steps:

Establish a cloud infrastructure that is efficient and optimized for continuous delivery.

To accelerate continuous delivery, efficient IT operations and more closely align with business objectives, teams can use Agile quality metrics and DevOps to rapidly deploy and manage new software in shorter development cycles. This enables faster deployment frequency and more dependable releases. These techniques are increasingly becoming the modern way for enterprises to migrate software to the cloud and even develop cloud-native software.

Embracing Best-of-BreedTools

Some of the most innovative technologies, including cloud readiness assessment, help identify accelerators and roadblocks to cloud migration efforts, helping teams get a better perspective of the quantum of efforts in migrating software to a cloud environment. CAST Highlight is a great example of a powerful tool that helps teams accelerate cloud adoption.

If enterprise IT can transform cloud computing from silver bullet to strategic advantage, it will lead to improved customer experience and monetary growth for the company. Modern software development practices are essential to this goal and also offer tangible benefits in improving software quality, developer productivity, application security, time-to-market and operational efficiency.